In 2016, artist Austyn Weiner and producer Dylan Lewis had a chance encounter at Burning Man. While lying on a giant bean bag in a zebra onesie, Austyn was joined by a man wearing just a loincloth. Without a word, the two kissed.
She then walked away, satisfied with the chance encounter. “It was all very biblical,” she says, laughing. Except what happened in the Black Rock Desert didn’t stay in the Black Rock Desert.
A few months later, a friend asked Austyn if she could bring a friend to her studio. When she opened the door, there stood Dylan. This time, he was fully clothed.
“We immediately recognized each other, and thus began a six-year dance of artist and collector, friend, and crush,” she says. “Eventually the pandemic brought us to committing to one another and we never looked back.” In 2022, Dylan proposed to Austyn at their friend’s house in Eze, France—a place of creative solace where she often goes to paint.
“On the most picturesque afternoon, Dylan found me on our balcony, hair disheveled, taking out the trash in a 20 euro mumu I had bought off the side of the road. He told me to stand still so he could take a photo of me. Mid-photo, he dropped down to one knee and asked me to marry him,” she says.
Austyn gave a one-word response back: The couple knew they wanted to marry at the groom’s movie ranch, Blue Cloud, just north of Los Angeles, which doubles as a film production set and therefore is a blank slate. For the next two years, they turn.